Dr. Roberto Filippello (he/him) is Assistant Professor of Media and Culture and is affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis as well as the Amsterdam Centre for Middle Eastern Studies. Prior to joining the University of Amsterdam he was a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia and the recipient of a Marie Curie Global Fellowship co-sponsored by the University of Melbourne and Sapienza Università di Roma. 

Dr. Filippello works across the fields of Critical Fashion Studies, Queer Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies. His research investigates how fashion has been used across various historical contexts, especially in the Mediterranean and MENA regions, to shape spaces of political expression and community formation. He is interested in how fashion practices (such as design, photography, and film) can function as forms of critique that destabilize the colonial, capitalist, and heterosexual fantasies embedded in the Western imagination, and ultimately carve out alternative aesthetic imaginaries. He is currently at work on his first monograph, Dressed for Dissent: Decolonial Fashion and the Queer Struggle for Palestine.

His research has been published in a range of journals, including Cultural Studies, Third Text, Criticism, Film Quarterly, Journal of Palestine Studies, Australian Feminist Studies, ​​​​Fashion Theory, and International Journal of Fashion Studies. He is the co-editor of Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress (2023) and of a forthcoming special issue of Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty on transgender embodiment in fashion and beauty. He is a regular reviewer for top-tier journals in gender and sexuality studies and media studies, and is a member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), the College Art Association (CAA), and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).

Graduate students researching fashion/textiles and politics, Palestine/Israel, Arab photography, and queer visual and material culture are encouraged to reach out.